Interactive Flow of Katherine Dunham’s Dancers, Drummers, and Singers: “Check-Ins” 1947-60

Antonio Jimenez Mavillard created this flow diagram to visualize a dataset manually curated by Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit for Dunham’s Data. The sankey visualization makes it possible to interactively examine the connections among the 189 dancers, drummers, and singers in Dunham’s employ between 1947 and 1960. Doing so, users can see who shared space and time together and therefore have a sense of the transmission of embodied knowledge across hundreds of performers. We shade each performer by the first time they appear in our data, from dark blue for the earliest performers to light blue for those who joined later on. Vertical bars represent “check-ins,” with black signifying where we have comprehensive performer data and white where data is partial.